In the days, weeks and months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the world took on a new awareness.  In The Air That September, Thomas Porky McDonald, a lifelong resident of Queens, New York, gives one man’s take on how the world he knew was affected by the tragedy, reacted to it and helped aid in the healing process.  As an individual who did not lose a close friend or loved one on that unfathomable day, McDonald was blissfully living out the final days of the inaugural season of the short season, Minor League “A” ball Brooklyn Cyclones, who were on the verge of winning a memorable championship.  The return of professional baseball in Brooklyn after 44 years, in fact, had served as the catalyst for a book that was originally to be about a month long tour of baseball parks near and far, from the lowest level to the very highest.  Then, on the morning of September 11, planes started falling from the sky.

Beginning with his original vision, McDonald takes the reader to where the book’s title, which was born a few months earlier, eventually led him – right back to his New York roots.  The Air That September is, as it says in its opening pages, A New York Story.  The game of baseball, which had always been a very vital part of the City scene for over a century, serves as a bookending force for the most destructive single act of terrorism in the world’s history to date.  Before 9/11, Minor League baseball, played in single deck parks in both Brooklyn and Staten Island, had become one of the stories of the New York Summer.  After 9/11, Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium, the two Big City yards that had seen so many thrills in the past, became the most tangible place where New Yorkers could come together in large (50,000 plus) numbers as one.  In McDonald’s view, the life-lifting nature of the ballpark helped celebrate and honor the life saving efforts of so many brave women and men, many of whom lost their lives on 9/11/01.

Thomas Porky McDonald is a poet and writer who often uses baseball and the ballpark venue to relay his views on life, in general.  His most recent release, Where the Angels Bow to the Grass, A Boy’s Memoir, taken mainly from the writers’ childhood days of the 1960’s and 70’s, described the bond between McDonald and his father, Bill “The Chief” McDonald. Previously, McDonald published a pair of anthologies, which paid homage to heroes of the past.  An Irishman’s Tribute to the Negro Leagues and Over the Shoulder and Plant on One: An Irishman’s Tribute to Willie Mays each contain short stories and factual material, as well as a small dose of McDonald’s trademark baseball poetry.  A third volume, Hit Sign, Win Suit: An Irishman’s Tribute to Ebbets Field, will soon be released, thus rounding out a unique three book homage to the National Pastime.  McDonald has also published a book of short stories, Paradise Oval and the first of four poetry collections, Ground Pork: Poems 1989-1994.  The second collection, Downtown Revival: Poems 1994-1997, is primed for release in 2003.  He plans on publishing the remaining two volumes of this set, Closer to Rona: Poems 1997-1999 and Still Chuckin'’ Poems 1999-2002, in the very near future.  Born in St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, McDonald has lived in nearby Astoria his entire life.

Manhattan

I’ll always remember the smoke.  Not the massive black clouds coming from each building following impact, nor the masonry white billows that roared through the streets of Downtown Manhattan after each Tower fell.  These television images (for me and countless others) are more vibrantly remembered, no doubt in horror and desperation, by those who were there at the scene, or in the immediate vicinity.  What I’ll remember, though, is the light gray film, replete with a million black particles, which found its way across the river and into Downtown Brooklyn, where I work.  This evil mist hovered in the Brooklyn air for the better part of the day, and represented the remnants of what will always be the worst possible fire anyone in the City will ever experience.  I’d never seen anything like that constant and unapologetic swirling soot, and I haven’t seen anything like it since.  Which I guess is the prevailing and overriding legacy of that entire day.

The shock of the first moments, when my partner Esty and I first ran to the other side of the fifth floor of our 130 Livingston Street offices, to a waiting television, went away rapidly.  As we viewed the first Tower burning and – moments later – the unbelievable sight of a second plane smashing into the previously unaffected Tower, I recall a brief inner trek through apprehension and fear.  This was followed rather quickly be an indignant snarl that filled my soul.  The very thought of such an attack offset all feelings of personal fear and also outer dread for those who in an eye-blink were doomed.  The thought that from the moment each guided missile met its target, instant death was guaranteed for so many, would come later, along with all the other grief that the images of the coming days would garner.  I remember later thinking that the time that Esty and I had spent running from our desks to the conference room television – about 15 seconds – was probably more time than anyone on the impacted floors in the World Trade Center had to escape.  That was and remains a mind-boggling equation to deal with.

There has been much written about the reaction of New Yorkers’ to these unprecedented attacks, at the time and in the aftermath.  What I can submit, that is, my personal emotions, I feel are absolutely relevant as representative for someone from the City who did not directly lose a loved one that day.  I would never be so foolish or bold as to try and compare my feelings to those who lost someone, as I have seen so many lamely attempt to do since that time.  I’m always amazed how when something high profile occurs anywhere, in a good, bad, wonderful or horrific way, there is a time directly following said event when an incongruous number of people try to associate themselves with the moment at hand.  Being “part of” something is a sort of sick obsession we’ve all seen, if not acknowledged.  Well, I’m not ashamed to say that I’m very happy that I was safely just across the river in Brooklyn, and not in the Trade Center.  But I do pride myself, as someone born and raised in Queens – someone who used Manhattan as part of my childhood playground – as a New Yorker through and through.  I always was, and always will be, a New York City street kid.  And though I wasn’t a brawler myself (I never got in a fistfight, though I broke up hundreds), I respected the law of the City streets.  You settle your arguments one-on-one, with fists and not guns, knives or other weapons.  Only the cowards used weapons.